Unum Group Architect Charts a DevOps Course to a Hybrid Cloud Future

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how Unum Group has benefited from a better process around application development and deployment using HP tools.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the HP Discover Performance Podcast Series. I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your moderator for this ongoing discussion of IT innovation and how it’s making an impact on people’s lives.

Gardner

Once again, we're focusing on how IT leaders are improving their services' performance to deliver better experiences and payoffs for businesses and end users alike, and this time we're coming to you directly from the recent HP Discover 2013 Conference in Las Vegas.

Our next innovation case study interview highlights how employee benefits provider Unum Group has been building a DevOps continuum and is exploring the benefits of a better process around applications development and deployment. And we are going to learn more about how they've been using certain tools and approaches to improve their applications delivery.

So join me in thanking our guests for being here. We're joined by Tim Durgan, an Enterprise Application Architect at Unum Group. Welcome, Tim.

Tim Durgan: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: We're also here with Petri Maanonen, Senior Product Marketing Manager for Application Performance Management at HP Software. Welcome, Petri. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Petri Maanonen: Hello, Dana.

Gardner: Let's talk a little bit about what's important for your company. You're a large insurer. You're in the Fortune 500. You're one of the largest employee benefits providers in the U.S. and you have a big presence in the UK as well. What are some of the imperatives that have driven you to try to improve upon your applications delivery?

Durgan: Even though, as you said, we're one of the largest employee benefits providers in the United States, we began to realize that there were smaller companies starting to chip away in segments of the market.

Durgan

It became imperative to deliver products more rapidly to the market, because delivery was a multi-year effort, which was unacceptable. If it took that long from concept to delivery, there would be a completely new market dynamic at play.

We started to look at application architectures like service-oriented architecture (SOA) to deliver agility, process automation, and rules automation -- all very mainstream approaches. We discovered pretty quickly that to use those approaches effectively you needed to have a level of governance.

Governance initiative

We had an SOA governance initiative that I led and we brought in technology from HP to aid us with that. It was the Business Service Management (BSM) suite of tools, the Systinet Repository, and some partner products from HP.

What we discovered very quickly is that in enterprise architecture, where I am from in the company, bringing in an operational tool like monitoring was not hailed as, "Thanks for helping us." There was this organizational push back. It became very clear to me early on that we were operating in silos. Delivery was doing their efforts, and we would throw it over the wall to QA. QA would do their job, and then we would ultimately move it out to a production environment and operational aspects would take over.

It really dawned on me early on that we had to try to challenge the status quo around the organization. That's what started to get me focused on this DevOps idea, and HP has a number of products that are really allowing that philosophy to become a reality.

Gardner: Tell me what you think that philosophy is. Does it differ from perspective and position within organizations as an enterprise architect, sort of a über role over some of these groups? How do you define DevOps?

Durgan: I have a couple of principles that I use when I talk about DevOps, and I try to use titles for these principles that are a little disruptive, so people pay attention.

For instance, I'll say "eliminate the monkeys," which essentially means you need to try to automate as much as possible. In many companies, their development process is filled with committees of people making decisions on criteria that are objective. Machines are very good at objective criteria. Let's save the humans for subjective things.

We want to put a product out quickly, but if it's going to fail, we would love to know it's going to fail very quickly, not make millions of dollars in investments.

That's what I talk about when we say eliminate the monkeys, get people out of the middle. It's really interesting, because as an architect, I recognize the automation of business process. But somehow I missed the fact that we need to automate the IT process, which in a lot of ways, is what DevOps is about.

Another principle is "fail fast." If you're going to deliver software fast, you need to be able to fail fast. As an example that I presented here at the conference last year -- which I knew most of the HP people loved -- was Palm. I'm sure they wished they had failed faster, because that was a pretty painful lesson, and a lot of companies struggle with that.

Unum does. We want to put a product out quickly, but if it's going to fail, we would love to know it's going to fail very quickly, not make millions of dollars in investments.

Another one is visibility throughout. I will say monitoring is a team sport. In a lot of companies, there are 50 or 60 monitoring tools. Each team has a monitoring tool. You have to have a secret decoder ring to use each monitoring tool.

While diversity is normally a great thing, it isn't when it comes to monitoring. You can't have the ops guy looking at data that's different from what the developer is looking at. That means you're completely hopeless when it comes to resolving issues.

Working collaboratively

My last one is "Kumbaya." A lot of IT organizations act competitively. Somehow infrastructure believes they can be successful without development and without QA and vice versa. Business sees only IT. We are a complete team and we have to work collaboratively to achieve things.

So those are really the ways I think about DevOps at the company.

Gardner: Petri, when you hear words like "process automation for IT" and a common view of the data across IT groups, it must be music to your ears?

Maanonen: Oh, sure. And the team has been very accurately capturing the essence of how DevOps needs to be supported as a function and of course shared among different kinds of teams in silos.

Maanonen

If you look at HP, we've been supporting these various teams for 15 years, whether it has been testing a performance of an application or monitoring from the end-user perspective and so forth. So we've been observing from our customers -- and Unum is a brilliant example of that -- them growing and developing their kind of internal collaboration to support these DevOps processes. Obviously the technology is a good supporting factor in that.

Tim was mentioning the continuous delivery type of demands from the business. We have been trying to step up, not only by developing the technology, but actually bringing very quickly supportive software-as-a-service (SaaS) types of offerings, Agile Manager and Performance Anywhere for example. Then, customers can quickly adopt the supporting technology and get this collaboration and a DevOps cycle, the continuous improvement cycle, going.

Gardner: Now, of course, this isn't just a technology discussion. When you said Kumbaya, obviously this is about getting people to see the vision, buy into the vision, and then act on the vision. So tell me a little bit more, Tim, about the politics of DevOps.

We are a complete team and we have to work collaboratively to achieve things.

Durgan: So you are going to ask me politics for this public interview. At Unum there is none, first of all, but I hear there is at other companies. I think the problem that a lot of companies have, and Unum as well, is that unfortunately we all have individual expectations and performance. We all have a performance review at the end of the year and we have things that we need to do. So it is, as you mentioned, getting everybody to buy into that holistic vision, and having these groups all sign up for the DevOps vision.

We've had good success in the conversation so far at Unum. I know we've talked to our Chief Technology Officer, and he's very supportive of this. But because we're still on the journey, we want data, metrics, and some evidence to support the philosophy. I think we're making some progress in the political space, but it's still a challenge.

I'm part of the HP BSM CAB (Customer Advisory Board), and in that group is, they talk about these other different small monitoring products trying to chip away at HP's market. The product managers, will ask, "Why is that? And I say that part of the problem is BSM is pitching enterprise monitoring.

The assumption is that a lot of organizations sign on to the enterprise monitoring vision. A lot of them don't, because the infrastructure team cares about the server, the application team cares about the app, and the networking team cares about the network. In a lot of ways, that's the same challenge you have in DevOps.

Requests for visibility

But I hear a lot of requests from the infrastructure and application teams for that visibility into each other's jobs, into their spaces, and that's what DevOps is pitching. DevOps is saying, "We want to give you visibility, engineer, so that you can understand what this application needs, and we want to give you visibility, developer, into what's happening in the server environment so you can partner better there."

There is a good grassroots movement on this in a lot of ways, more than a top-down. If you talk about politics, I think in a lot of cases it has to be this “Occupy IT” movement.

Gardner: What are some of the paybacks that are tangible and identifiable when DevOps is done properly, when that data is shared and there is a common view, and the automation processes gets underway?

Maanonen: What we hear from our customers, and obviously Unum is no exception to that, is that they're able to measure the return on investment (ROI) from the number of downtime hours or increased productivity or revenue, just avoiding the old application hiccups that might have been happening without this collaborative approach.

Also, there's the reduction of the mean time to resolve the issues, which they see in production and, with more supportive data than before, provide the fix through their development and testing cycles. That's happening much faster than in the past.

There is a good grassroots movement on this in a lot of ways, more than a top-down.

Where it might have been taking days or weeks to get some bugs in the application fixed, this might be happening in hours now because of this collaborative process.

Gardner: Tim, what about some of the initiatives that you're bound to be facing in the future, perhaps more mobile apps, smaller apps, the whole mobile-first mentality, and then more cloud options for you to deploy your apps differently, depending on what the economics and the performance and other requirements dictate. Does DevOps put you in a better position vis-à-vis what we all seem to see coming down the pike?

Durgan: It is, if you think about movement to the cloud, which Unum is very much looking at now. We're evaluating a cloud-first strategy. My accountability is writing this strategy.

And you start to think about, "I'm going to take this application and run it on a data center I don’t own anymore. So the need for visibility, transparency, and collaboration is even greater."

It’s a philosophy that enables all of the new emerging needs, whether it’s mobile, cloud, APIs, edge of the enterprise, all those types of phenomena. One of the other major things  we didn’t touch on it earlier that I would contend is a hurdle for organizations is, if you think about DevOps and that visibility, data is great, but if you don’t have any idea of expectations, it’s just data.

What about service-level management (SLM) and ITIL process, processes that predated ITIL, just this idea of what are the expectations, performance, availability, what have you for any aspect of the IT infrastructure or applications? If you don’t have a mature process there, it’s really hard for you to make any tangible progress in a DevOps space, an ALM space, or any of those things. That’s an organizational obstacle as well.

Make it real

One of the things we're doing at Unum is we're trying to establish SLAs beginning in dev, and that’s where we take fail fast to make it real. When I come to the conference and presented it, I had a lot of people look surprised. So I think it's radical.

If I can’t meet that SLA in dev, there's no way I am going to magically meet it in production without some kind of change. And so that’s a great enhancement. At first people say, that’s an awful lot of burden, but I try to say, "Look, I'm giving you, developer, an opportunity to fail and resolve your problem Monday through Friday, versus it goes to production, you fail, and you're here on the weekends, working around the clock."

That, to me is just one of those very simple things that is at the heart of a DevOps philosophy, a fail fast philosophy, and a big part of that development cycle. A lot of the DevOps tooling space right now is focused on some ALM on the front end, HP Agile Manager, and deployment.

Well, those are great, but as an application architect, I care about design and development. I think HP is well-positioned to do some great things with BSM, which has all that SLA data, and integrate that with things like the Repository, which has great lifecycle management. You start having these enforcement points and you say, "This code isn't moving unless it meets an SLA." That decision is made by the tool, objective criteria, decided by the system. There's no need to have a human involved. It's a great opportunity for HP to really do some cutting-edge and market-leading stuff.

Cloud and mobile are coming into play and are increasing the velocity of the applications and services being provisioned out to the end users.

Maanonen: We see that the cloud and mobile, as you mentioned, Dana, are coming into play and are increasing the velocity of the applications and services being provisioned out to the end users. We see that this bigger and larger focus, looking from the end user perspective of receiving the service, whether it’s a mobile or a cloud service, is something that we've been doing through our technology as a unifying factor.

It's very important when you want to break the silos. If the teams are adopting this end-user perspective, focusing on the end user experience improvement in each step of the development, testing, and monitoring, this is actually giving a common language for the teams and enhancing the chances of improved collaboration in the organization.

Durgan: That's a really good point. You start to hear this phrase now, the borderless enterprise, and it’s so true. Whether it’s mobile, cloud, or providing APIs to your customers, brokers, or third parties, that's the world we now live in. So we need to increase that quality and that speed to market. It’s no longer nice to have; You've got to deliver on that stuff.

If you don’t adopt DevOps principles and do some of these things around failing fast and providing holistic visibility and shared data, I just don't see how you change the game, how you move from your quarterly release cycle to a monthly, weekly, or daily release cycle. I don’t see how you do it.

Gardner: Here at HP Discover, we're hearing a lot about HAVEn, a platform that’s inclusive of many data and information types, with scale and speed and provisioning.

We're also hearing about Converged Cloud, an opportunity to play that hybrid continuum in the best way for your organization. And we heard some interesting things about HP Anywhere, going mobile, and enabling those endpoints at an agnostic level.

But after all, it’s still about the applications. If you don't have good apps -- and have a good process and methodology for delivering those apps -- all those other benefits perhaps don't pay back in the way they should.

Strong presence

So what’s interesting to me is that HP may be unique in that it has a very strong presence in the applications test, dev, deployment, fostering Agile, and fostering DevOps that the other competitors that are presenting options for mobile or for cloud don't have. So that’s a roundabout way of saying how essential it is to make people like Tim happy to the future of HP?

Maanonen: Tim has been pointing out that they're coming from a traditional IT environment and they're moving to the cloud now very fast. So you can see the breadth of the HP portfolio. Whatever technology area you're looking at, we should be pretty well-equipped to support companies and customers like Unum and others in different phases of their journey and the maturity curve when they move into cloud, mobile, and so forth. We're very keen to leverage and share those experiences we have here over the years with different customers.

Yesterday, there were customer roundtable events and customer advisory boards, where we're trying to make the customers share their experiences and best practices on what they've learned here. Hopefully, this podcast is giving an avenue to the other customers to hear what they should explore next.

But the portfolio breadth is one of the strengths for HP, and we're trying to stay competitive in each area. So I am happy that you have been observing that in the conference.

The portfolio breadth is one of the strengths for HP, and we're trying to stay competitive in each area.

Gardner: Last word to you, Tim. What would you like to see differently -- not necessarily just from a product perspective, but in terms of helping you cross the chasm from a siloed development organization and a siloed data center and production organization? What do you need to be able to improve on this DevOps challenge?

Durgan: The biggest thing HP can do for us is to continue to invest in those integrations of that portfolio, because you're right, they absolutely have great breadth of the offerings.

But I think the challenge for HP, with a company the size they are, is that they can have their own silos. You can talk to the Systinet team and talk to the BSM team and say, "Am I talking to the same company still?" So I think making that integration turnkey, like the integrations we're trying to achieve, is using their SOA Repository, their Systinet product as the heart of an SOA governance project.

We're integrating with Quality Center to have defects visible in the repository, so we can make an automated decision that this code moves because it has a reasonable number of defects. Zero is what we'd like to say, but let's be honest here, sometimes you have to let one go, if it’s minor. Very minor for any Unum people reading this.

Then, we are integrating with BSM, because we want that SLA data and that SLM data, and we are integrating with some of their partner products.

There’s great opportunity there. If that integration can be a smoother thing, an easier thing, a turnkey type operation, that makes the portfolio, that breadth something that you can actually use to get significant traction in the DevOps space.

Gardner: Well, great. I'm afraid we will have to leave it there. We've been learning about how Unum Group has been working toward a DevOps benefit and how they've been using HP products to do so.

So join me in thanking our guests, Tim Durgan, Enterprise Application Architect at Unum Group. Thank you, Tim.

Durgan: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: And also Petri Maanonen, Senior Product Marketing Manager for Application Performance Management at HP Software. Thank you, Petri.

Maanonen: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: And I'd like to thank our audience as well for joining us for this special HP Discover Performance Podcast coming to you from the recent HP Discover 2013 Conference in Las Vegas.

I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series of HP sponsored discussions. Thanks again for joining, and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how Unum Group has benefitted from a better process around application development and deployment using HP tools. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2013. All rights reserved.

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Deeper Intelligence Shared More Widely via HP Vertica Harvests Gems for Guess Retail Strategy

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how retailer Guess, Inc. has helped democratize data and speed up business decisions with HP Vertica.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the HP Discover Performance Podcast Series. I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your moderator for this ongoing discussion of IT innovation and how it’s making an impact on people’s lives.

Gardner

Once again, we're focusing on how IT leaders are improving their services' performance to deliver better experiences and payoffs for businesses and end users alike, and this time we're coming to you directly from the HP Discover 2013 Conference in Las Vegas.

Our next innovation case study interview highlights how retailer Guess, Inc. has used HP Vertica to both speed up and better distribute its big-data analytics capabilities.

We'll see how Guess can increasingly predict how to satisfy its shopping customers, and we'll specifically look at how Guess's IT organization came to grips with adopting and implementing a big-data platform to bring more of a democratization of data and better access to its employees.

To learn more about how Guess has slashed the latency between data gathering and actionable insights, please join me now in welcoming our guest, Bruce Yen, Director of Business Intelligence at Guess, Inc. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Bruce Yen: Dana, thanks for having me here. It's a pleasure to be here and be able to share what we’ve done with HP Vertica.

Gardner: Tell me why just plain, old relational databases and legacy IT weren’t doing the job for you.

Yen: About three years ago we began searching for a new database platform. We were hitting a lot of performance bottlenecks on our data loads and performance. We also saw the competitive landscape out there with lot of our competitors embracing alternative solutions to their traditional database platforms.

Gardner: What sort of requirements did you have to get to where you wanted to be?

Yen: The first thing was performance. We needed to improve the query performance. A lot of our users were asking us to do a lot of queries with very low-level detail inventory, and it was very costly from a performance standpoint to be able to serve those queries up. Some queries wouldn't even come back.

Secondly, from a performance standpoint, we wanted to make sure that a lot of our East Coast stores would be able to receive the reports early in the morning, and we were having problems just serving those up on a daily basis on time.

New solution

The last part was to support any kind of innovative analytics, any kind of cutting-edge analytics. We knew that that platform really wasn't going to help us do any of that. So we needed to find a new solution.

Gardner: Before we go any further into what that solution did for you, let's learn more about Guess. We know one of your popular and well-known products is your jeans, Guess Jeans, but there is more to it than that. Tell us a bit about the organization.

Yen

Yen: Guess has been around for more than 30 years now and we've grown from primarily a U.S. retailer into more of an international retailer.

If you look at the '80s, lot of people from the States remember us for the triangle on the jeans. We were primarily a wholesaler in the beginning. Now, we have over 1,600 stores worldwide, and about half of those are run by licensees. We sell a wide variety of lifestyle products, targeting primarily younger women in their late teens to early 30s.

Gardner: So it's critical to understand that market, and this is a dynamic market. People's tastes change and tastes are also, of course, different from area to area around the world. What have you gotten as a result of Vertica? Can you give me some of the key performance indicators that now demonstrate what you can do when you've got the right platform and the right data.

Yen: I like to look at it this way. First of all, it's foundational, the foundations for just baseline performance. Have we met those goals? With Vertica we have. We've been able to meet all of our service-level agreements (SLAs) and serve up the reports on time. Not only that, but now we're able to serve up the queries that we weren't able to do at all.

We've been able to meet our daily needs, but we've been able to set ourselves up to be competitive in this area.

When you move aside from the foundational, the next steps are analytics, being able to apply analytics and go through our data to figure out how we can apply best practices to see how we can gain a competitive advantage. We've been able to take our transactional data and look at ways of taking the stored data and applying that into our e-commerce site to get better product recommendations for our e-com customers. That’s something that we couldn't have done with our existing system.

We have our customer relationship management (CRM) system. We have our loyalty segmentation for which we use Vertica to do all of the analytics and we feed that data back into our CRM system. With the data volume that we have, we could not have done that with our old system.

So it's opened up new doors, but not only from a foundational standpoint. We've been able to meet our daily needs, but we've been able to set ourselves up to be competitive in this area.

Gardner: And has being able to gain the speed and handle the complexity prompted you to then seek out additional data to put into your analytics, so in a sense of not feeling limited as to where you can go and what information you could bring to bear?

Different data

Yen: Definitely. We've been looking at different things lately. We've been looking at different types of data -- loyalty data and customer data -- that we get from our customers.

In being able to give our users a holistic 360-degree view of what's happening from that customer standpoint, Vertica has been very critical in keep pace and enabling us to do that.

Gardner: Of course, it's important to get more data, manage it, and perform what you need to do with it. It's also important to deliver it in a way that people can use and to get to what we mentioned earlier about that democratization. Tell me how you've been able to deliver this out to more people and in an interface and device fashion that they really want.

Yen: That’s a great point. Everyone talks about big data these days, but big data, if you can't serve it up to people, if they can't use it, and if there's not a pervasive use of the data, is really useless.

We're pretty innovative in what we do from a mobile standpoint. For the last two years we've had an iPad app that's powered by the Vertica back end. We have this iPad app that over a 100 merchants in North America and Europe use.

The exciting thing is being able to see our users look at the data and make the decisions.

It's been able to take a lot of the data, a lot of the stores’ data, a lot of the selling information. It's allowed them to travel to the stores, be in meetings, or at home on the weekends, and they can look at the best-seller information. They can look at the sales and do it in a way that is actually fun.

It's not just a bunch of dashboards or reports that you open up and look at, but we've made it very interactive and we’ve created workflows in there. So that really draws the user into wanting to use that information and wanting to ask different questions.

Gardner: And for this combination of the power of the platform, the quality of the data, and this distribution capability, can you give us some metrics of business success? Where this has helped you. Do you have any concrete things you can point at and say it's really working and here is how?

Yen: We’ve looked at that in different ways. One of the initial points that we're analyzing in terms of return on investment (ROI), the easiest one is the amount of paper that’s being saved. You can count up the reams, how much they cost, and multiply that, and there is some significant saving there.

But that doesn’t really excite anyone. It's great that we've been able to save paper, but the argument is, well, you also had to buy new equipment. These iPads aren’t free and the mobile device management software and everything else that's associated to it is a new ecosystem. So there is a lot of new cost there.

The exciting thing is being able to see our users look at the data and make the decisions. Before, they would have to stop at a meeting and go back to their desks. That decision that takes an instant now used to drag on for two or three days, maybe even a week, and I've seen that in action.

It's done a good job

I can't give you an actual dollar figure, but I've seen them make decisions to change the allocation of certain items as they are looking at that information. As I was training some of our executives or power users, I would see them pick up the phone and actually make decisions to impact the business. So I know that it definitely has done a good job there.

The exciting thing is it's kind of democratized this information and this data and demystified it to a point where everyone can access it and everyone wants to access it. I’ve never seen users get so excited about a platform or an app. We've got emails saying, "Can I please have this app. I saw one of my coworkers using it. Could I please?" Before, we were never asked that way.

It was always, "Can I get a copy of that report. No big deal if I get it now or later." But here, people really, really want to use it, and we could tell that we hit something.

Gardner: It's always good when you're in IT and you're perceived as a hero and not something else. Let's talk about the IT experience. Earlier on, you had to go on relational databases and traditional legacy approaches to data. You went to a new platform. What was it like to install? Did this create some skills gap? How was this received, and how did you react in terms of your IT people?

The one thing that I'm proud of is that our team was able to conquer all of these hurdles, and also we had a great partner in Vertica.

Yen: Initially, we had to deal with just our internal IT folks being very skeptical. A lot of the claims, "30 to 300 to 400 times faster in performance," "you’re only going to need a quarter of a DBA," were the first two items where a lot of us were a little skeptical, myself included, but the performance has really proved itself.

Aside from that, we have to look at it more realistically. How do we implement a system like this? A lot of it has to do with changing the data loads, and that, in and of itself, takes a lot of time. That's one of the things that's always going to take a lot longer than we thought, and it would be a lot more challenging than we had initially anticipated.

The one thing that I'm proud of is that our team was able to conquer all of these hurdles, and also we had a great partner in Vertica. They were there with us in the trenches, even though we were the first retailer and we had a different use case than all of the other previous clients and customers that they had.

We took a chance with them, they took a chance with us, and it worked out. We were able to prove that their software works on a multitude of different use cases. As a retailer, we have a lot of updates with our data. This was three years ago. Their clients then, lot of the telcos and banks were just loading data, not really doing a lot of updates with it. They were doing a lot of queries with it and it was coming back fast, but not really transforming the data all that much. So we had a lot more use cases like that and they were able to come through for us.

Gardner: What about the future? Do you have a sense of taking this powerful capability and pointing it in new directions, perhaps into supply chain, the ecosystem of partners, perhaps even into internal operations? What's the next step?

Exciting times

Yen: It's actually exciting times, because Vertica has proved itself so well. It's also very cost-effective. One of the projects that we're working on right now is that we have a relational database for our MRP system. It's more of an ODS reporting system. We’re actively converting the ODS system, which is actually a replicated database of the relational database, into a Vertica database. We're able to kind of replicate, mimic the native database replication scheme on the relational side, and use Vertica for it.

It's a use case that we were a little skeptical about in the beginning. Could this be done in Vertica? We thought, the payoff would be great if we could do this on Vertica, the speed for performance, the storage footprint, would be amazing. So far, it's turned out very well for us. We’re still in the middle of it, but all things point to success there.

Gardner: Well great. I am afraid we’ll have to leave it there. We’ve been learning about how Guess Inc. has been using HP Vertica to both speed up and better distribute its big-data analytics capabilities.

And we’ve seen how Guess’s IT organization came to grips with adopting and implementing a big data platform to slash the latency between data gathering and actionable insights. So a big thank you to our guest, Bruce Yen, Director of Business Intelligence at Guess. Thanks a lot.

Yen: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: And thanks also to our audience for joining us for this special HP Discover Performance Podcast coming to you from the HP Discover 2013 Conference in Las Vegas.

I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series of HP sponsored discussions. Thanks again for joining, and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how retailer Guess, Inc. has helped democratize data and speed up business decisions with HP Vertica. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2013. All rights reserved.

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Cybersecurity is a Necessity, Not an Option, in the Face of Global Security Threats, Says CSC

Transcript of a BriefingDirect podcast on the growing need for cybersecurity as an important organizational goal for businesses and government agencies.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the HP Discover Performance Podcast Series. I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your moderator for this ongoing discussion of IT innovation and how it’s making an impact on people’s lives.

Gardner

Once again, we're focusing on how IT leaders are improving security and reducing risks as they adapt to the new harsh realities of doing business online.

We have a fascinating discussion today, because we're joined for Part 2 of our series with HP strategic partner and IT services and professional services global powerhouse CSC. We'll be exploring how CSC itself has improved its own cybersecurity posture.

With that, please join me in welcoming our guests, Dean Weber, the Chief Technology Officer for CSC Global Cybersecurity. Welcome back, Dean.

Dean Weber: Thank you.

Gardner: We're also here with Sam Visner, Vice President and General Manager for CSC Global Cybersecurity. Welcome back to you too, Sam.

Sam Visner: Thanks, Dana, for this opportunity to discuss this topic.

Gardner: As you recall, in Part 1 of our series, we examined the tough challenges facing companies and how they need to adjust their technology and security operations. We saw how they were all now facing a "weapons-grade threat," as we put it, with big commercial incentives for online attacks and also a proliferation of more professional attackers. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

We also learned how older IT security methods have proven inadequate to the escalating risks that are also expanding beyond corporate networks to include critical infrastructure, supply chains, and even down to devices and sensors.

So today, we'd like to take a deeper dive into how CSC itself is going beyond just technology and older methods to understand a better path to improve cybersecurity.

Let me start with you, Sam. What's the most impactful thing that CSC has done in the past several years, perhaps in concert with HP, that's proven to be a major contributor to a more secure environment?

Visner: There are three things to which I'd point. In the course of any conversation about three things, I'll think of a fourth, a fifth, a sixth, and a seventh in due course, but let me start with three things.

The first is the recognition that cybersecurity is an important issue for any organization today, whether they're a Global 1000 company, a Fortune 500 company, or a government agency, and everybody has a stake in cybersecurity.

Same question

The first thing is that, because everybody has this stake, there has been a recognition that the cybersecurity of the commercial world and the cybersecurity of the public sector are really the same question.

Visner

The commercial world provides the technology on which governments depend. Governments express the interest that the public has and the cybersecurity of those parts of the private sector that manage energy, transportation, critical manufacturing, aerospace, defense, chemicals, banking, healthcare, and any other thing that we call critical infrastructure.

In our company, where we serve both the public sector and private sector, we recognized early on that it made sense to address commercial and public sector cybersecurity from a common strategy. That's the first thing.

The second thing is that we then built a unified capability, a unified P&L, a unified line of business and delivery capability for cybersecurity that brings together our commercial and our public-sector business. We're end to end. So from consulting and assessments, then education, through managed cybersecurity services and systems integration, all the way through incident response, we make our full portfolio available to all our customer set, not just part of our customer set.

And the third thing is -- and I am going to ask Dean Weber to comment on this, because more than anyone else he has been the motivating powerhouse here -- a lot of people think about cybersecurity as tools. What's my firewall? What's my user provisioning? What's my password policy? How am I handling passwords? What should I be doing about endpoint protection?

That's a recipe for disaster, because you're always playing catch up against the problem and you don't even know if the tools work together.

That's a recipe for disaster, because you're always playing catch up against the problem and you don't even know if the tools work together. You certainly don't have the means to take the information that these tools generate, put them together, analyze them and give yourself the big picture that allows you to be effective in understanding the total threat you face and the total situation that you have internal in your organization.

The third thing that has been important is moving from a tools-based perspective to an architecture-based perspective, one in which before we buy tools or develop tools, or even in which we define offerings, we define the architecture of our offerings.

What are we trying to do? How will these offerings fit together in accruing information outside of our enterprise about the global threat environment and inside of an enterprise about everything that affects the security of an organization, from their smartphone, all the way down to their industrial control systems on the shop floor?

What are the offerings that, when knit together, give you a total capability? Then, what are the specific technologies that are pertinent to each of those offerings? So taking an architectural approach as opposed to a product-specific approach is the third basic development.

Again, the public sector and commercial sector have to be approached in a common strategy, the need to build a common organization serving all our customers across the CSC space, and approaching our solutions from an architectural perspective where you fit everything together in terms of offerings, capabilities, and technology. Those would be the three things to which I'd point.

Architectural level

Gardner: Dean Weber, let's get some more input on the shift from a tools perspective or a tactical perspective to that architectural level?

Weber: As Sam pointed out, the idea here is that we need an integrated capability to combat the current and emerging threats. You do that based on a global ability to detect and defer the threats, remediate as quickly as possible from threats that have manifested themselves, and recover.

Weber

Not only are we a services provider of managed security services to enterprise and government, we also consume those services ourselves on the inside. There's no difference. We drink our own champagne, or eat our own dog food, or however you want to put it.

But at the end of the day we have made this very security operations center (SOC)-centric offering, where we have elected to use a common technology framework across the globe. All of our SOCs worldwide use the same security and information event management -- SIEM technology, in this case HP ArcSight.

That allows us to deliver the same level of consistency and maturity, and given some of the advanced capabilities of ArcSight, it has allowed us to interconnect them using a concept we call the global logical SOC, where for data protection and data privacy purposes, data has to reside in the region or country of its origin, but we still need to share threat intelligence, both internally generated and externally applied. The ArcSight platform allows us to build on that basis.

Separate and apart from that, any other tools that we want to bring to bear, whether that's antivirus or vulnerability scanning, all the way up the stack to application security lifecycle, with a product like Fortify, we can plug all of that into the managed framework regardless of where it's delivered on the globe and we can take advantage of that appropriately and auditably across the entire hemisphere or across the entire planet.

The idea here is that we need an integrated capability to combat the current and emerging threats.

Visner: Dean mentioned HP Fortify. As you may know, we're bringing out an application security testing-as-a-service component of our portfolio. It’s an offering. That was done very deliberately. It's a portfolio of offerings that comprise a total capability. Each offering goes through offering lifecycle management to ensure that it conforms to the architecture, and then trade studies to determine which technologies, in this case the HP Fortify technology, are pertinent to that offering.

As we move out on this, what people should expect is not that somebody is going to show up and say, "Buy our tool." Instead, what we're going to be doing is soliciting requirements for tools and technologies, some of which we'll buy or license and some which we'll develop ourselves that conform to the total architectural approach that Dean described. What we're doing with HP Fortify is a perfect example of that very deliberate and methodical approach.

Gardner: It sounds as if an important pillar of those three items you brought up, Sam, the common strategy, unified capability, and architecture, is to know yourself as an organization, to deeply understand where you are, and then be dynamic in terms of tracking that. Do the HP Fortify and HP ArcSight technologies come to bear on that aspect of self-awareness?

Visner: The way I would put it is this. We have to deal with a situation in which we have a broad set of industries that we serve from a cybersecurity perspective. I'm going to take a look at the ArcSight situation here more particularly, because the ArcSight situation is one that had to serve CSC and its customers on a global basis.

Wide range of environments

We do cybersecurity for public-sector organizations, but we also do it for chemical companies, banks, aerospace and defense companies, manufacturing companies, and companies in the healthcare space.

We have to be able to bring together data across a very wide range of environments. Although there are some great global threats out there, some of those threats are being crafted to be specific to some of the industries and some of the government’s activities that we try to safeguard.

Therefore, in the case of ArcSight, we needed an environment that would allow us to use a broad range of tools, some of which may have to be selected to be fit for purpose for a specific customer environment and yet to accrue data in a common environment and use that common environment for correlation and analysis.

This is a way in which our self-awareness as a company that does cybersecurity across many sectors of the private sector, as well as a broad range of public sector organizations, told us that we needed an environment that could accrue a wide range of data and allow us to do correlation.

In terms of what we're doing with Fortify and application security testing,  one of the things we've learned about ourselves is that we're going to support organizations that have very specific applications requirements. In some cases, these requirements will relate to things like healthcare or banking. In some cases, it will be for transactions. In some cases, it will be specific workflows associated with these industries.

We are trying to raise the bar globally to one, high, common level of application security testing.

What’s common to this, we have learned, is the need for secure applications. What’s also common is that globally the world isn’t doing enough in terms of testing the security of applications. This is something we found we could do that would be of value to a broad range of CSC customers. Again, that's based on our own self-awareness of what those customers need in our history.

Remember, our company has been doing independent IT and software work since 1959. One of the things we've learned over 54 years is that there is a wide variety of things that organizations do in terms of making their software really useful, and there is a wide variety in the attention they pay to testing that software from the perspective of security.

We are trying to raise the bar globally to one, high, common level of application security testing. So that’s a way that we are working with it. That’s what the Fortify tool will help us do.

Gardner: Dean Weber, to Sam’s point about the amount of data required to track, understand, and follow, do you consider this a big-data function? We hear, of course, a lot about that in the marketplace these days. How important would general-data and/or big-data capabilities be in a good secure organization? Are they hand in hand?

Weber: They are absolutely hand in hand. As we generate more data across our grids, both sensor data and event data, and as we combine our information technology networks with our operational technology networks, we have an exploding data problem. No longer is it finding a needle in a haystack. It’s finding a needle amongst needles in a haystack.

Big-data problem

The problem is absolutely a big-data problem. Choosing technologies like ArcSight that allow us to pinpoint technology aberrations from a log, alert, or an event perspective, as well as from a historical trending perspective, is absolutely critical to trying to stay ahead of the problem. At the end of the day, it’s all about identity, access, and usage data. That's where we find the indicators of these advanced threats.

As the trade craft of our opponents gets better, as Sam likes to put it, we have to respond, and it’s not easy to respond at that level. One of the reasons that Fortify is going to become one of the cornerstones of our offering is because as we get better at securing infrastructure using the technologies we've already talked about, the next low-hanging fruit is the application vulnerabilities themselves.

Recently, Android announced that they have a vulnerability in their crypto product. There are 900 million Android products that are affected by that. While Google has released a patch for that particular crypto vulnerability, all the rest of the vendors who use an Android platform are still struggling with how to patch, when to patch, where to patch, how do they know they patched.

Visner: And who is responsible for the patch?

Weber: And who is responsible for the patch, absolutely true.

It’s not enough to know that I have got good governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) enterprise-wide password maintenance and password reset.

Gardner: That brings us to this. When you talk about responsibility and tracking, who is doing what and how it’s getting done? We started to talk about key performance indicators (KPIs). How much of a shift have you had to go about there at CSC to put in place the ability to track metrics of success and KPIs? How do you measure and gauge these efforts?

Visner: I'm going to ask Dean to cleanup on my answer, but a lot of people are paying attention to global threat intelligence and threat attribution. That’s really important, but I think what’s even more important is not knowing where the threat came from, or what the motivations are. That’s useful to know, because it can help characterize other aspects of the threat and what you can expect from the threat actor to do, not just in terms of one piece of malware, but an integrated approach.

The other piece of this is understanding yourself. That is to say it’s not enough to know that I have patched my desktop. It’s not enough to know that I have got good governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) enterprise-wide password maintenance and password reset.

I have to know everything about my enterprise today, all the way down to the industrial control systems on the shop floor, the supervisory control and data acquisition systems that coordinate my enterprise, the enterprise databases and applications that I use for global transactions, as well as individual desktops and smartphones.

What we're really talking about is a level of awareness that people are not used to having. They're really not. People don’t worry about what goes on beyond their own computer. Even CIOs haven’t really worried about the cybersecurity of computers that are embedded in manufacturing systems or control systems. Now, I think they have to be.

Swinging back to the awareness question, this is required of us and of any other enterprise to go beyond the status of an individual device to treat the status of the entire enterprise as important corporate knowledge. That's important corporate knowledge.

Holistic global view

Think of it this way, this is an organization that needs to know globally what its credit worthiness is, where its lines of credit are, and how it’s using those lines of credit and its cash instruments globally to manage its cash flow. That’s important corporate knowledge, and it has to be dealt with on a holistic global view. Otherwise it’s worthless.

The same thing is true with cybersecurity, knowing what the effect is. Cybersecurity of a specific server is interesting, but it's actually not nearly as useful as knowing the state of cybersecurity throughout your entire enterprise. That's global corporate knowledge and that's the difference between a piece of information which is interesting and corporate knowledge which is vital, important, and very valuable.

We have to treat the state of cybersecurity in an organization with the same seriousness, and consider it to be the same level of resource and asset, as the global cash flow of a global organization. It's the same thing.

Gardner: Dean Weber, the opportunity to bring big-data capabilities to bear on this problem is one thing that we've addressed, but there is also the operations and organizational side of having reports, delivering reports, measuring those reports, and being able to act on it.

We have to treat the state of cybersecurity in an organization with the same seriousness, and consider it to be the same level of resource and asset, as the global cash flow of a global organization.

What have you done there to allow for a KPI-oriented or a results-oriented organizational approach that leverages of course all the data?

Weber: You've just touched on the value proposition for a global managed security services provider (MSSP) in the fact that we have data sources that span the planet. While CSC as a 90-plus thousand person organization is considered a large scale organization, it pales in comparison to the combined total of CSC's customer base.

Being able to combine intelligence and operational knowledge from multiple enterprises spanning multiple countries and geographic regions with differing risk postures and business models, sometimes even with differing technologies employed in those models, gives us a real opportunity to see what the global threat looks like.

From the distribution of that threat perspective our ability to, within the laws appropriate across the globe and auditable against those laws, share that threat intelligence without rushing up against or breaking those laws is very important to an organization. This ultimately keys to the development of the value proposition of why do business with the global MSSP in the first place.

Gardner: It was interesting to me when Sam said that there's no difference between understanding your financial situation and your security posture. Is there some opportunity for security and cybersecurity to be a driver for even better business practices?

Now, you might start employing these technologies and putting in place these operational capabilities because of an existential threat to your security, but in doing so, it seems to me that you're becoming a far better organization along the way. Have any customers, or have you yourself, been able to demonstrate that taking the opportunity to improve your cyber posture also improves your business posture?

Not well managed

Weber: That's becoming evident. Not everybody gets it yet, but more and more people do. The general proposition is that an organization that doesn't understand, for example, its financial position is not well-managed and isn't a good investment. It probably can't mobilize its resources to support its customers.

It isn't in a position to bring new products to market and probably can't support those products. Or it might find that those product lines are stolen, manufactured at a lower standard by somebody else, and not properly supported, so that the customer suffers, the company suffers, and everybody but the cyber thief suffers.

A financial organization that can't take care of their own financial position can't serve their customers, just as an organization that doesn't understand its cybersecurity posture can't preserve value for shareholders and deliver value for its customers.

Gardner: Dean, looking at this same benefit, what you do for cybersecurity benefits extend to other business benefits, is there a return on investment (ROI) impact where you could measure the investments made for extensive security but then leverage those capabilities in other ways that offset the price. Has that been the case for you or are you aware of anyone that's done the bean counting in such a fashion?

Where the rubber hits the road is more along the lines of keeping the CEO and the CFO out of jail when they have to sign off on things like Sarbanes–Oxley.

Weber: There absolutely is an ROI in security. In fact, there is actually a concept of return on security investment (ROSI), but I would say generally that most people don't really understand what those calculations mean.

Where the rubber hits the road is more along the lines of keeping the CEO and the CFO out of jail when they have to sign off on things like Sarbanes–Oxley. Or the fact that you don't have to make an SEC filing as a result of financial-systems breach that impacts your ability to keep revenues that you may have already attained.

The real return on investment is less measured in savings than it is in -- as Sam likes to say -- keeping us off the front page of "The Wall Street Journal" above the fold, because the real impact to these things traditionally is not in the court of law, but in the court of public opinion.

They tend to look at organizations that can't manage themselves well and end up in the news at not managing themselves well, less favorably than they do for companies that do manage their operations well.

Visner: What is a pound of cybersecurity worth? I'll put it to you this way. What is a pound of stolen intellectual property worth? That that intellectual property means that somebody else is stealing patient data, manufacturing your products, or undermining your power grid.

One way of thinking is that it's not the value of the cybersecurity so much, but the diminished value of the assets that you would lose that you could no longer protect.

Measuring ROI

That’s as good a place as any to measure that ROI. If you do measure that ROI, the question is not how much are you spending on cybersecurity. The question is what would you lose if you didn’t make that spend. That’s where you see the positive return on investment for cybersecurity, because for any organization, the spend on cybersecurity is almost insignificant compared to the value that would be lost if you didn’t make that spend.

When you think about what it cost to bring to market a product, a new pharmaceutical, a new aircraft design, a new jet engine, and what happens if somebody gets there first or undermines your intellectual property, the value of that intellectual property towards what people are prepared to spend and protect is worth it.

Gardner: As we take the lessons internally, can you offer some recommendations for how others could proceed? Are there any aspects of what you've done with HP internally at CSC that maybe provide some stepping stones? What would you recommend in terms of first steps, initial steps, or lessons learned that others might benefit from in terms of what you've done?

Visner: The real question is not what we've done internally, but the internal process we used, for example, in deciding to work with a specific strategic partner. We recognized early on that this is not a one company problem.

This is a problem where we are dealing with weapons grade threats from organized criminals who have vast resources at their disposal.

This is a problem where we are dealing with weapons grade threats from nations-state. This is a problem where we are dealing with weapons grade threats from organized criminals who have vast resources at their disposal. This is a problem of intellect, and therefore, no one organization is going to have sufficient intellect to be able to deal with this problem globally.

As a company, CSC tends to seek out partners to whom we can couple our intellect and get a synergistic result. In this case, the process of making that relationship real when it flows through defining our portfolio, defining the services that comprise the portfolio, managing the development of those services through our offering lifecycle management process, and then choosing companies whose technology provides the needed strength for each one of those offerings, each one of the elements of that portfolio.

In this case, that process serves us well, because we're going to need a wide range of technology. Nobody is in a position to confront this problem on their own -- absolutely nobody. Everybody needs partners here. But the question is whom?

We have people show up on our doorstep with ideas and technologies and products every day. But the real issue is, what is a good organizing principle? That organizing principle has two components. One, you need a wide range of capabilities, and two, you need to choose from among the wide range of technologies you need for that wide range of capabilities. You need a process that’s disciplined and well-ordered.

Believe me, we have people show up and ask why it takes so long, why it's such an elaborated process, and can't you see that our product is absolutely the right one.

The answer is that it's like a single hero going out onto the battlefield. They maybe a very effective fighter, but they're not going to be able to master the entirety of the battlefield. That can't be done. They're going to need partners. They're going to need mates in the field. They're going to need to be working alongside other people they trust.

Strategic partner

So in working with HP and the ArcSight tool as our security information and management player of our global logical SOC, our global logical managed cybersecurity service, and in working with HP Fortify we chose a partner we thought -- and we think correctly -- is a strong long-term strategic partner.

It's somebody with whom we can work. HP recognizes that we do. They're not going to solve this problem on their own. What one company is going to solve a problem on their own when they are up against the global environment of nation-state and trade actors? We all need these partnerships.

Our company is unique in that we've always looked to our partner relations for key technologies to enable offerings in our portfolio.

We've always believed that you go to market and you serve your customers with strategic partners, because we've always believed that every problem that had to be solved would require not only our abilities as an integrator, but the abilities of our partners to help in the development of some of this technology. That’s what makes the most sense.

For a company like CSC that is largely technology-independent, it gives us access to a wide range of technology partners. But as a company, we're smart about the partners that we choose because of the technologies that we have. Although there's a wide range of potential partners, we work with companies that we think are going to be long-term strategic partners against high-value problems and challenges -- in this case HP and cybersecurity respectively.

Gardner: Last word to you, Dean. Just based on your experiences, as the Chief Technical Officer increasing and improving your security posture, are there any lessons learned that you could share for others that are seeking the same path?

Although there's a wide range of potential partners, we work with companies that we think are going to be long-term strategic partners against high-value problems and challenges.

Weber: I'll leave you with two thoughts. One is again the value proposition of doing business with a global business MSSP. We do have those processes and processes in our background where we are trying to bring the best price-performance products to market.

There maybe higher-priced solutions that are fit for purpose in a very small scale, or there may be some very low-price solutions which are fit for purpose in a very large scale, but don't solve for the top-end problems. The juggling act that we do internally is something that the customer doesn't have to do, whether that’s the CSC internal account or any of our outside paying customers.

The second thing is the rigor with which we apply the evaluation process through an offering lifecycle or product lifecycle management program is really part and parcel of the strength of our ability to bring the correct product to market in the correct timeframe and with the right amount of background to deliver that at a level of maturity that an organization can consume well.

Gardner: Well, great. I'm afraid we'll have to leave it there. We've been exploring how IT leaders are improving security and reducing risks as they adapt to the new and often harsh realities of doing business online and we've been learning through the example of CSC itself.

I’d like to offer a huge thanks to our guests. We've been here with Dean Weber, Chief Technology Officer for CSC Global Cybersecurity. Thank you, Dean.

Weber: Thank you.

Gardner: And also Sam Visner, Vice President and General Manager for CSC Global Cybersecurity. Thank you so much, Sam.

Visner: It's been a pleasure. Thank you for having us.

Gardner: And you can gain more insights and information on the best of IT performance management at www.hp.com/go/discoverperformance. And you can always access this and other episodes of our HP Discover Performance podcast series on iTunes under BriefingsDirect.

I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator for this ongoing discussion of IT innovation and how it's making an impact on people’s lives.  Thanks again for listening, and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.

Transcript of a BriefingDirect podcast on the growing need for cybersecurity as an important organizational goal for businesses and government agencies. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2013. All rights reserved.

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